2008's Top Weird News Stories

When Michelle Allen of Middletown, Ohio, was accused of urinating on a neighbor's porch and chasing children in a crazy cow costume, we in the weird news business knew her mug shot would be hard to top.

Some worthy contenders: Florida's self-proclaimed vampire, the Batman gone bad and a Joker fully decked-out in greasepaint.

In August, when Bernann McKinney of California stood before cameras to unveil the cloned pups of her deceased pitbull, Booger (for which she paid $30,000), we knew she was different.

A few days later, British tabloids recognized her as Joyce McKinney, a woman charged in 1977 with kidnapping a Mormon missionary and skipping out on bail. McKinney allegedly chloroformed the man on the steps of a church, whisked him off to a remote villa, shackled him in mink handcuffs, and forced him to have sex.

Before the trial, McKinney ran off to the United States and had been living in relative obscurity. Once discovered, she berated the media, telling the Associated Press, "My mother always taught me, 'Say something good or say nothing at all'."

In the Obama age, anything is possible. When Stu Rasmussen mounted his political comeback, he did it in style -- with high heels and breast implants. The newly elected mayor of Silverton, a mountain town in Oregon, served two terms back in the late '80s and early '90s, before his sexual reawakening. Now, he sports long curly locks of red hair and a new, can-do attitude.

Nobody needed to see Verne "Mini-Me" Troyer's sex tape. But it was hardly as gross as the guy charged with having sex with his picnic table, the woman who allegedly sold videos of herself having sex with her dog, the guy who cooked his girlfriend, or the Danish students who killed and ate a cat on Facebook.

Natives of the Greek Island of Lesbos are properly known as "Lesbians," and if you're an uptight heterosexual living there, you should brace yourself for a lifetime of painfully obvious jokes. This year, however, a group filed a lawsuit asking a court to ban use of the word to describe gay women. They not only lost, the judge ordered these non-gay Lesbians to pay for wasting the court's time.

Two other highlights in laughable litigiousness: a California woman sued Victoria's Secret after injuring her eye while trying on a thong. A New York businessman also sued over an eye injury. His came after a stripper accidentally smacked him in the face while taking her clothes off.

When a Swedish company launch a line of teeny-weenie bikinis -- for girls as young as two months old -- the outcry from child advocates and feminists was as predictable as it was justifiable. The same could be said for GPS Lingerie -- underwear that lets a woman's boyfriend know where she is all the time.

Guys weren't so thrilled to try on condom with measuring tape along the side, though pole dancing on wheels seems like a venture that might be either legal or desired somewhere.

Talk about unintended consequences: When Esquire included Pope Benedict on its annual list of “Best Dressed Men” –- calling him “Assessorizer of the Year” for his stylish red leather shoes –- rumors started flying. That when Vatican officially denied that the 81-year-old Holy father was a Prada devotee. (And we all know which fallen angel wears Prada!)

In other religious news, the Virgin Mary appeared on an MRI and the face of Jesus turned up on an electric guitar (both listed on eBay), and the Mormon church excommunicated the publisher of the Sexy Mormon Calendar.

For all the hang-ups Americans have about their bodies, 2008 was another year of bizarre exhibitionism, both legal and otherwise. One man from the Sunshine State was arrested while cavorting with an alligator, while a Texas man climbed a cell phone tower in the buff in a desperate bid for attention and better reception.

We saw a woman arrested for bartending nude and a priest pleading guilty to nude jogging

On the right side of the law, we had New York's Naked Cowboy, who launched a lawsuit against the candy maker Mars Incorporated, claiming the blue M&M has stolen his almost-naked/guitar-strumming image , and San Francisco's Naked Clown who put together a hilarious calendar of barely-dressed bozos to raise money to fight leukemia.

Adolf Hitler may have fomented a world war and slaughtered millions of his own people in the name of ethnic cleansing, but he was a nice guy around the house, at least according to 91-year-old Rosa Mitterer, his longtime housekeeper. But so what? Charles Manson wrote a hit song for the Beach Boys, and that never impressed his parole board.

In other Hitler news, use of his image remains controversial in Germany, and when the Madame Tussauds' Berlin museum unveiled his wax figure in July, it was immediately beheaded

Thomas Beatie, the so-called pregnant man, gave birth in July to a healthy baby girl. Now he and his wife are expecting another child

One man saved his life by dialing 911 With Big Toe, another paid $1,350 for Frosted Flake Shaped like Illinois and a 3rd Grader was suspended for sniffing a sharpie.

We Mourned the loss of the World's Tallest Woman, the World's Ugliest Dog, and the inventor of Pringles (who was buried in a Pringles can) … But, also, we celebrated the marriage of the world's fattest man and the world's tallest man's first child.

I'll see you next year!